Stress Management in the Classroom

Its that wonderful time of year again, mid-term time. The time when every teacher you have and a few you don’t are stressing you out beyond measure. If you’re anything like me you find that you have a million and seven assignments all due within a four day window and you’ve only done chunks of everything. I’ve found this to be the case almost every semester, and every semester I am overwhelmed to the point of tears. This year my UGP is due, a few assignments for each my other two education classes and a small, but pressuring paper for my Shakespeare class. Why in the world I felt the need to pick up that Shakespeare class this semester I will not be able to ever rationalize except that it kept me still on track of graduating on time. That’s the only reasoning I have really.

Anyway, my point here is that being a student is stressful, that’s all a part of the experience these days it seems. But, I refuse to believe that the amount of stress students are under these days is humane or in any circumstance necessary. This stress is about as equivalent to me as Drill Instructors in the military screaming at you to get your respect, my meaning here is that you don’t have to scream at me to get my respect, that’s not how I was raised, sorry. And that being reduced to tears and/or mental breakdowns as stress and DI’s often do, is not effective enough to teach me how to handle the real world. You can tell me that the experience could come in handy someday, maybe if some insane person kidnaps me and makes me their slave, but until that becomes a likely statistic or a social norm, do not scream at me, I don’t care what your rank is over me, because it isn’t going to be met well, and I’ll probably cry anytime you look at me in the future, and no one wants that.

Having said that, it’s incredibly important to remember that your students are stressed out of their minds too. My wonderful CO301D professor recently re-tweeted at me with her to-do list to make me feel better, or at least comforted in knowing I’m not alone in being in over my head, and lord I felt bad for her. I’m assuming she has to have all of those things done by next Wednesday because the next day she will be herding 80 kids to New York, New York for a business week’s worth of time. She’s told us one of the activities they will be doing, and our entire class is super excited for them. But I cannot imagine the stress she will be under as a chaperon, so good luck to you Cindy!

So, on to my advice:

I have this app it’s called Pacifica (it’s in the iTunes App Store, I’m not sure if it’s available on the Google Play Store). It is an app that helps track moods, activity, stress levels, and offers activities to help learn to manage stress, and my favorite feature of the app at the moment is that it has guided and unguided meditations that range from a little more than one minute to thirty minutes, but they can be replayed and the sounds will continue to play as long as you need them and until you click the Done button on the screen.

I’m not being paid to promote the app, I wish I was though, but I felt that it was a great resource for students and teachers. It is very useful in defusing stressful situations.

Hours & Info

Text Widget

This is a text widget. The Text Widget allows you to add text or HTML to your sidebar. You can use a text widget to display text, links, images, HTML, or a combination of these. Edit them in the Widget section of the Customizer.